“I would have gone for the big Zoom setup where you’re sitting up,” he said, “but since we’re going to be talking about Henry, I just wanted to be comfy.”
Henry is Delaney’s 2½-year-old son, the third of his four children. Henry died of brain cancer on that same taupe couch in January 2018. It might seem strange to some that a parent would keep a piece of furniture like that, let alone lie on it for an interview where he will be talking about such a devastating loss, but that’s the thing about grief. You might want to set fire to the reminders, or sink into them. You may feel rage one minute and a burst of love the next. There’s no right or wrong, no explanation needed.
My first glass of black, undiluted, pure robusta was a punch in the neck. It was 2,000-proof vodka plus caffeine. It made me want to dive, open-mouthed, into a swimming pool filled with sweet cream. This was nothing like the other wimpy thing called “coffee” I’d spent my entire life drinking, and at some primitive, sensory level, I struggled to process it. But I controlled my expression because Bang Duong, the man who’d grown and roasted and brewed this Thorlike drink, was seated right across from me. It was January 2020, and we were on the second floor of Ho Chi Minh City’s Tractor Coffee, a mecca of reclaimed wood, unfinished steel, and burlap tones that wouldn’t be out of place in Berkeley or Berlin save for one thing: Tractor was one of the only cafés I could find that made seed-to-cup coffee from the world’s least loved variety of bean. That could make it the staging ground for a far-fetched culinary revolution.
That’s one way of looking at it. Another, perhaps more uncomfortable view is that we’ve never needed to know John Wilkes Booth more than we do right now. His politics — white supremacy, grievance, conspiracy, revanchism — have suddenly broken open and become our politics. His contemporaries aren’t the United States’ mass shooters so much as the right-wing extremists who stormed the capital on January 6 and who now have apologists in the highest rungs of American government. Booth may be remembered as an egomaniacal lone wolf — this despite him working with a group of conspirators, most of whom would later hang for their crimes — but the truth is that he embodied a political tradition as American as the man he shot dead. Indeed, to know Booth, to fully reckon with who he was and to grapple with why he did what he did, is to have a window on the modern United States.
For all its sly humor and cool detachment, “Toad” is a deeply melancholy story, not an elegy for lost youth, but an exorcism. Reflecting on her time with Sam and Carlotta, Sally says, “These things don’t make me wince anymore; I have the excuse of time, which allows me to despise my youth without being at all responsible for most of it.” And, later in the novel, “So many of the desperate things I did in my youth were to combat belonging to the mass identity … all the pain and hatred — it kept me afloat.”
It would be a rare filmmaker who managed to eliminate himself from his own aesthetic prescriptions entirely, or even at all. Tarantino’s critical intelligence both refracts and reflects: He reveals himself in his opinion of others, just as surely as he illuminates their influence in his own work. What unites the various threads and themes of this book is the broad autobiographical truth that he was a filmgoer before he was a filmmaker, and will remain so for far longer. “Does anybody really think Altman watched other people’s movies?” he asks at one point, and in Tarantino’s book, you feel there can be no worse put-down of a fellow director, though he does not say so exactly. That’s what makes it so killer.